Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
My rating: 4/5 cats
laini taylor is a straight-up godsend. she’s masterful at writing characters you care about, at building worlds down to the dust in the corner of a room, at creating conflicts that are analogous to a reader’s experiences despite being set in imaginary realms populated by creatures not-quite-human, and she’ll rip your heart out with zero regrets.
this book opens with the death of a character you’ve never met, so your heart stays right where it is, and then it schoomps back in time and you’re deep into a hundred or so pages following the story of a dreamy booknerd named lazlo strange (dreamy like “strange the dreamer,” not dreamy like [insert name of whatever celebrity is considered to be dreamy these days]) and his devotion to reading all the books, with an especial attraction to fairytales and stories about “the unseen city,” a land so far and mysterious that it has become the stuff of legend – warriors and creatures and magic, a city whose true name vanished from memory in an instant and is now known as weep. and this segment is all packed with details of war and lazlo’s obscure origins and his place within his world and magic and alchemy and unexpected opportunity and how books broke his nose and changed his life and by the time you meet up with the character whose death you witnessed in the prologue, you’re inundated with minutia and have half-forgotten that even happened.
but the other half remembers, and the more you get to know her, the more you don’t want to care too much about her as a character, because you know where this road ends. it’s no fun – braced for the inevitable thing that’s coming while the characters are themselves unaware, wanting there to be a creative loophole that will make things seem less …final.
it’s like how sean of the house came home when i was bingewatching OITNB season 5 and hung out for a bit and now that he’s joined me on my complete series rewatch, he’s already prepared for the death of a beloved someone that shocked us all when it happened, and now he’s in that uncomfortable position of knowing who but not when or how, and he’s not gonna feel the heartpunch as much as if he had just watched the show with me from the beginning, as i beseeched him to do.
seeing the future has never been something to envy, powerball aside.
overall, i didn’t love this as much as i loved the daughter of smoke and bone trilogy, which is still one of the best things i’ve ever read, particularly that middle book. there were times here when i thought her trademark poetical flourishes were strained and some of the banter was too cutesy, and it took a while to get going, but it’s still SO. DAMN. GOOD.
because she ended it with a friggin’ surgical strike to the feels.
just when you thought you were safe – when the thing you knew was gonna happen happened and you’re comforting yourself by googling silver linings and lemonade recipes for all these sour sour lemons, that’s when laini taylor swoops in and rips your heart out for real, and she’s all, “sucks to your lemonade, son!”
it’s like that line from Night Film:
Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you realize you’re on another trapdoor.
i am so ready for the second part of this.
******************************************
the aftermath of a war between gods and men.
a mysterious city stripped of its name.
a mythic hero with blood on his hands.
a young librarian with a singular dream.
a girl every bit as dangerous as she is in danger.
alchemy and blood candy, nightmares and godspawn, moths and monsters, friendship and treachery, love and carnage.
on the one hand, that kind of sounds like drunk mad libs.
on the other hand, i LOVE drunk mad libs.
blood candy?? moths? carnage? librarian??
i want this like crazy.
